In case you haven't heard, the 2014 Winter Scripting Games are just now getting started. Regardless of your skill level with PowerShell, it couldn't be a better time to participate since this is the first time in the history of the scripting games that you'll be able to work as part of a team and receive proactive …

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Let's start out by taking a look at what the PowerShell built-in help says about the ValidatePattern and ValidateScript validation attributes: Here's what that help topic says about ValidatePattern: We'll test using ValidatePattern with an example that I used in my entry for advanced event #4 in the Script Games this …

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My entry for the Scripting Games advanced event 4 contained four separate functions: I want to create a module that contains these functions. There are several different types of modules, but what I'll be creating is a "Script Module". Modules sound like something really complicated, but script modules are …

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As I'm sure most of my blog readers are aware, I competed in the advanced track of the Scripting Games this year and ended up doing quite well. Two first place finishes and three second places finishes with the official judges and four first place crowd score finishes. I also ended up being the overall winner of the …

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For me, the Scripting Games have been a great learning experience this year. I've used many PowerShell features that I hadn't used before such as splatting, ADSI, Workflows, and producing html webpages with PowerShell. I plan to write detailed followup blog articles on each of these topics over the next few months. …

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For this event I created multiple functions and I'm going to quote chapter 6, section 1 of the Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches book written by Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks, published by Manning: A function should do one and only one of these things: Retrieve data from someplace Process data Output data …

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I’m seeing a trend with a lot of PowerShell scripters. Many of us have a GUI, non-scripting background and we moved to PowerShell because we didn't want to be button monkeys clicking through the same options in the GUI day in and day out. I've always heard, if you’re going to do something more than once, do it (script …

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The majority of the entries I've seen for the Scripting Games event 2 are using the TotalPhysicalMemory property from the Win32_ComputerSystem WMI class to determine the total amount of physical memory in a server. The property name is TotalPhysicalMemory after all so that's what it should contain, right? Not so fast, …

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Here's my approach to the 2013 PowerShell Scripting Games Advanced Event 2: When I start one of the Scripting Games events, I read and re-read the scenario because if you don't understand the requirements, you can't write an effect script, function, command, tool, etc. It's not a bad idea to print out the event …

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This is a continuation from my previous blog titled 2013 PowerShell Scripting Games Advanced Event 1 – Parameters Don’t Always Work As Expected. This isn't the exact script, but sections of it. You'll notice at the bottom of the first image shown below, I retrieve the list of folder names from the files variable to …

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